


The Signs We Sometimes Understand

by ncfan



Category: Herbert West - Reanimator - H. P. Lovecraft, LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works
Genre: Curtain Fic, Domestic Fluff, Gen, M/M, Sickfic, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 22:18:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18081965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: While nursing his sick partner, Herbert deals with life's irritations, and with life in general.





	The Signs We Sometimes Understand

**Author's Note:**

> [ **CN/TW** : Period-typical racism ingrained into the fabric of daily life; classism; period-typical sexism; period-typical child labor; period-typical unsafe working conditions]

“Well, the good news is, I don’t think it’s the flu.”

“I didn’t think it was,” but Stephen’s voice was weaker than Herbert was accustomed to hearing (had been steadily growing weaker over the past couple of days, as the coughing fits grew more common and more intense), and didn’t carry the heat it might have if it was stronger. “You were the one insisting on that.”

Herbert nodded crisply as he wiped down the thermometer. “And it’s always better to seek a second opinion before you’ve decided you know what’s wrong with you.” Not that a cold wasn’t infinitely preferable to the flu. “Weren’t we always warned against the dangers of self-diagnosis?”

Stephen’s bed was raised a fair distance from the ground—it wasn’t significantly higher from the ground than other bedframes, but just enough to be noticeable—and when he sat up in it, he and Herbert were almost on eye level with one another. And yet, as Stephen looked at him with something close to disbelief, Herbert felt as if he was looking a long way up. “And yet—“ and despite the weak hoarseness of his voice, the disbelief came across quite strongly “—last December, when you fell ill, I had to fight to get you to let me do so much as take your temperature.”

A shrug, and an avoidance of eye contact Herbert hoped wasn’t too obvious. “As far as I can tell, you just seem to have a bad cold. I recommend rest.”

This earned Herbert a short huff of a laugh that turned, halfway, into a hacking cough; Herbert patted Stephen’s back, only a little awkwardly. “You had better…” Stephen cleared his throat, a wet, thick noise that made Herbert wince. “You had better check up on me pretty often, then. You might find me frozen solid under my bedsheets, if not.”

“Hmm.” Herbert rubbed at his own clammy hands, lips pursed.

The middle of February in the Miskatonic Valley was rarely what anyone could honestly call _warm_ , and this was no exception. Boston might be experiencing unseasonably warm weather, but Bolton? Was very much not. The snow was beginning to melt on days when the sun could actually be glimpsed from behind its dense curtain of gray cloud, but all that meant was that, at night, when the temperatures dropped sharply again, it would just refreeze, and turn what few paved roads there were around town into a major hazard.

The house, when they had obtained possession of it last year, had been in need of several repairs to be truly, meaningfully livable. There was a price to be paid for possession of a house so perfectly suited to their research, a price to be paid for a house so close to the potter’s field, and so remote from everything else. Herbert hadn’t realized just what that price was until it started to get cold.

It wasn’t just that the doors didn’t fit right on their frames (the back door was the worst offender, but not the only one), or that the locks had all needed to be replaced—for the latter, even if the locks had been in decent condition, it still would have been good practice to have them changed. It wasn’t just that most of the windows were in such poor condition as to necessitate replacement, or that the floorboards on the second floor felt decidedly rickety underfoot, or that Herbert had found a fair amount of mildew growing in a dark corner of the basement a week after they had finished moving their belongings into the house.

By some miracle, this old, ramshackle house that was clearly never meant to be occupied by anyone of note possessed indoor plumbing. On top of that, the house possessed indoor plumbing that hadn’t required extensive repairs as to be usable. The furnace, on the other hand? The furnace had not been so reliable.

The furnace was old; that much had been immediately apparent. The fact that it burned _wood_ and not coal was a testament to its age. While it was still warm outside, it had run smoothly, though that may have simply been because it had seen little use; while it was still warm, the kitchen stove had been sufficient to heat the house during chilly nights. Once they had begun relying more heavily on the furnace, though, the problems had quickly become apparent.

The first time the furnace broke down was early in November, and to say that it had been unpleasantly chilly in the basement when Herbert and Stephen hauled a fresh corpse onto one of the lab tables would have been an understatement. The repairman had come, fixed the furnace, and assured them it wouldn’t happen again.

The second time the furnace broke down was around the middle of December, and given how deep the snowdrifts had been at that time, Herbert and Stephen spent most of their free time huddled together by the kitchen stove or the fireplace until the repairman was able to make his way down to the end of Pond Street, apologize profusely, and fix what was wrong with the furnace.

And now, for a week running, the furnace was broken again.

The repairman had been mortified. He had offered a discount that Herbert and Stephen, even without consulting their checkbooks, knew they would have been fools not to accept. But he had not been able to come by yet, as apparently events in town were keeping him busy and he was already backed up, as far as appointments were concerned. Wonderful.

Herbert had the sinking suspicion that there was a reason this house had come so cheap.

Herbert fought to keep from gnawing on his lip as he hovered by Stephen’s bedside a little longer. The sun was (partially) out today, and gave a modicum of warmth to the room, especially once Herbert had thrown the curtains open, but not enough to cut through the bitter chill, and it left Stephen with one of his quilts pulled up around his shoulders, chalk-white face set in a cast unmistakable as anything but misery.

“I have a house call to make, but other than that, my schedule is free of appointments.” Herbert reached out a hand, hesitated, then went to tuck the quilt more securely around Stephen’s neck, wincing as the back of his hand brushed against febrile skin. “Once I’ve finished there, I’ll stop by the pharmacy, and see if they have any Aspirin and lozenges; we’re out, here.”

Stephen smiled faintly at him, with a fondness in his eyes that warmed Herbert, if only slightly. “Hurry back,” he said softly.

One day, one day Herbert hoped he would be comfortable enough with gestures of affection to do what he wanted to do, just now. The part of him that wanted to be more affectionate than he was clashed with the part of him that wanted always to hold himself at a remove, out of arm’s reach. He just wanted—

Setting his hand on Stephen’s arm felt like a poor compromise, but it got Herbert another smile before he had to leave the room.

-0-0-0-

Herbert was not a pediatrician. Stephen wasn’t a pediatrician. Neither of them were pediatricians, and Herbert distinctly remembered making it quite clear when they had first arrived here that they were not pediatricians, for there had been many questions about it at the time. The textile mill cast a long shadow over the people of Bolton, and the children who worked there were no more likely to escape injury at the hands of the machinery than the adults. Those local doctors who scorned to treat the poorer and the immigrant among the millworkers also scorned to treat their children, except in the gravest emergency; otherwise, they wrinkled their noses and had a merry time playing hot potato with the other doctors and their would-be patients.

Herbert knew that there was every chance that a mutilated child would be passed into his care for surgery. Under those circumstances, he was hardly going to turn said child away. All the same, he’d made it clear early on: he was not a pediatrician, and he was not going to patch up every scrape or bruise or treat every trifling ailment a child came down with. He wasn’t especially fond of young children in general, and on top of that, he hadn’t even specialized in pediatrics. He wasn’t going to pretend to be an expert. There was at least one pediatrician in the Bolton area; he was certain of it. Go see him instead.

And yet, here he was, making his way up the Farina family’s driveway, not for the first time this year. Not for the second time this year, either.

It probably didn’t do to alienate his laundress. That was the thought that kept running through Herbert’s mind, as he approached the house, even more ramshackle than his own had been when he had first moved in, eight numbers down from his own, where the slush the sun made of the snow had made a quagmire of the yard. The house was flanked by looming, grasping oak trees that did a fantastic job of blotting out the sun, and what little warmth Herbert had been drinking in vanished, leaving him bitterly cold and sighing to himself. If he wanted his clothes returned to him intact, and without any mud stains or coal stains on them, then it didn’t do to alienate his laundress.

There was some consolation in the knowledge that Alberto was unlikely to have suffered harm beyond a few cuts or bruises—he’d never suffered anything more severe than that, when Herbert or (in the beginning, before he’d somehow managed to offend Mrs. Farina, which given the way most women responded to him, Herbert found frankly baffling) Stephen had looked him over. There was some consolation in the knowledge that, since the mill was open today, Mister Farina would _not_ be home. A quick visit, at least, and hopefully with a minimum of unpleasantness.

As Herbert neared the porch, a frigid breeze carried the powerful odor of Mrs. Farina’s favorite soap to his nose. The smell was almost comforting, just like the weight of the bag in his hand was almost comforting.

He’d been expected; urgently expected, in fact, and Herbert had every expectation that the few minutes he had taken to assess his partner’s condition would be held against him. When he knocked on the door, what he expected was Mrs. Farina with a “Where have you _been_ all this time?!” ready on her lips, her strong accent not nearly strong enough to erase the exact nuance of displeasure from her voice. What he got instead was the patient in question opening the door slowly, and Herbert looking down into a small face where two crimson scratches, one on Alberto’s forehead and one on his right cheek, stood out in sharp relief from his pearly-pale, nearly translucent skin.

Alberto said nothing. Herbert knew his grasp of English to be perfectly serviceable; better than some of his siblings, in fact. But the boy still said nothing, instead staring up at him mutely, his dark eyes wide, gnawing on his lower lip.

Herbert raised an eyebrow as he looked Alberto over, drank in the soapy water stains on his shirt and his red hands. “Have another mishap, did you?”

At that, Alberto ducked his head a little, peering up at Herbert out of narrowed eyes. He didn’t answer Herbert’s question, not exactly, but he whispered, “There’s crawfish in the creek.”

Herbert’s stomach turned at the mention of fish, and he was momentarily grateful for the cold, if only because it allowed him to attribute his sudden shudder to something other than disgust. Unlike others he could mention, his brain _did_ keep working while in the throes of disgust, and something about the assertion pricked at his mind. “At this time of year?” he asked skeptically.

Alberto shrugged. “I saw them. I’m not _lying_ ,” he insisted, hunching his shoulders.

Herbert was spared from having to reply to that by the voice of Mrs. Farina carrying from the household kitchen, pitching high and sharp. “Is that the doctor? Let him _in_ , Alberto. I need you back here _soon_.”

Alberto let out a decidedly squeaky “Sorry!”, and for the life of him, Herbert couldn’t figure out who he was supposed to be addressing. The boy stood away from the door, and Herbert followed him inside.

Within, the house was much as Herbert remembered from his last visit. The Farinas rarely had the gaslights in their home turned on, be it day or night, and the only source of light was the sunlight that shot through windows streaked with grime, illuminating the entryway and makeshift parlor Herbert walked through in patches. There was very little furniture, little more than a few rough, unpainted wooden chairs, the legs of whom bristled with splinters (If Herbert remembered correctly, the visit during which Stephen managed to offend Mrs. Farina so badly was to extract particularly bad splinters from Alberto and one of his brother’s legs). Belongings such as gas lamps and the odd picture frame were set atop a couple of steamer trunks. The floor was all down in mud, water, and scattered cotton fibers, interspersed with what Herbert thought might have been tracked machine oil. How the oil didn’t get washed away in the muddy roads, he had no idea.

Whatever odors might have clung to the walls of the house on their own, the smell of soap, even stronger within the house than it was without, eradicated them all, with the end result that the house ended up smelling much cleaner than it looked. And Herbert thought it might have been a little neater in here today than it had been the last time he visited. There was slightly less mud on the floor.

The kitchen, meanwhile, was just as spotless as it had been the last time Herbert had had occasion to enter it. The smell of soap was so powerful as to be dizzying, and it matched well with the sparkling windows, the kitchen table and chairs free of crumbs or stains, the floor frothing with soap suds. There, in the center of the small open space between the stove and the table, was Mrs. Farina, sitting on a stool as she scrubbed a man’s shirt furiously against her washboard. It was immediately apparent where the soap suds had come from; water was running down the sides of her deep tin washtub in rivulets. Sweat ran down a face red with exertion, though not nearly as red as her constantly working hands.

“Good morning, Mrs. Farina,” Herbert announced himself when he crossed over the threshold into the kitchen. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Alberto hovering at his side, gnawing his lip as he looked at his mother.

Mrs. Farina looked up from her laundry and nodded shortly at him. “And where have you been all this time?” Sure enough, her accent did nothing to mask that exact nuance of displeasure. “Why’d you not follow Bianca straight here? You’ve have been here and gone by now.”

It _really_ didn’t do to alienate your laundress. Herbert mustered a thin, but, he hoped, not completely unfriendly smile. “Doctor Harper is sick. I was attending to him.”

Herbert hadn’t really expected much in the way of sympathy… and on that front, he was not disappointed. Mrs. Farina shook her head and tsked. “That man could survive a mine collapse. My Alberto is not so strong.”

Well, there was a cue if ever Herbert had heard one. “What is the matter with him, Mrs. Farina?” Herbert spared a glance for Alberto, who, judging by appearance, the way he walked, the way he held himself, seemed no more injured now than he had when he’d opened the door, though he was starting to look at his mother like he wished the earth would swallow one of them up—Herbert wasn’t sure which. “He seems relatively unscathed.”

Mrs. Farina looked at Herbert like he’d left his spectacles on his nightstand at home. “He ran off into the woods—“ when Mrs. Farina fixed her gaze on Alberto instead, there was some fondness mixed in with the exasperation, but the fondness had clearly been overpowered; the natural consequence, perhaps, of the panic she displayed every time the boy strayed from her sight for more than ten minutes “—because he prefers play to work. He comes back with cuts and his clothes crusted with mud. Now, one of those cuts starts to fester _. That_ is what I called you to see to.”

Alright. Herbert turned first to the kitchen table, but as he did so, he caught sight of the expression curdling on Alberto’s face. On an exhale, Herbert said, “The back stoop, then. I need more light to see by.”

The static, soapy cold of the Farina family’s kitchen was traded for the wind that pricked at every inch of exposed skin like fine teeth—and yet, Alberto seemed infinitely more cheerful, and a tense knot that had been forming between Herbert’s shoulders undid itself. Herbert checked to make sure the stoop was dry before sitting down and setting his bag down beside him. Sitting on his left side, Alberto squirmed a little, picking at his damp trousers with a hand that had cooled in shade from an almost boiled-looking red to a hard, peachy pink.

“Do you have any cuts besides the ones on your face?”

Alberto shook his head.

“Let’s get to business, then.”

It would likely be prudent to check the boy over for any other injuries; at the very least, for broken bones (If only because he’d catch hell from both of the adult Farinas if he managed to miss such). His pulse was steady, breath unobstructed by anything Herbert could pick up on with a stethoscope. Prodding Alberto’s abdomen (and _God_ , the rubber gloves he used were cold in the winter, even the late winter) yielded up no sign of broken ribs, and Alberto evinced no discomfort beyond what you would expect of an uninjured person being prodded hard in the chest.

And the cuts? Well, they did appear slightly inflamed, but no, not festering.

Probably best to sterilize them, anyways.

“Hold still,” Herbert murmured, as he wet a cloth with ethanol. “This will sting, and I don’t want to get any of it in your eyes.”

“Okay.”

No sooner did Alberto make this promise than did he jerk away from the ethanol-wetted cloth Herbert held to his cheek, a small whine escaping his mouth.

“I said, hold still!” Herbert scolded, setting his free hand firmly on Alberto’s shoulder; if the boy didn’t want to hold still on his own, he’d have to be held still. “If any of this gets in your eyes, you’ll have far worse than a few cuts to contend with.”

Alberto’s eyes darted towards the door. “It hurts!” he pleaded, though not as loudly as Herbert might have expected.

“Yes, I know.” Herbert forced himself to soften his tone. Children tended not to respond well to harsh tones. He knew, he remembered, and more to the point, he had watched Alberto run off from one of his shouting parents before. He had no desire to explain to Mrs. Farina why her son had run off from him. “If either of the cuts become infected, they will hurt far worse than this.” He held up the rag. “So please, try to bear with it.”

And Alberto did hold still, which… Well. Herbert hadn’t actually expected that to work. Oh, well.

“Done,” Herbert said to Mrs. Farina, as he walked back into the kitchen, Alberto darting out from beside him to stand by the kitchen table, shifting his weight from leg to leg.

Mrs. Farina nodded. She stood just long enough to take a few coins from her skirt pocket and hand them, damp and soapy as they were, over to Herbert, who didn’t bother trying to work out how much she had given him. This was a minor visit, and she was one of his only patients who ever paid promptly for services rendered, be it on her own behalf or someone else’s. Best not to press his luck on that score.

As she was sitting back down on her stool, she spoke, but not to Herbert. “We’re moving into a company house next summer.” Mrs. Farina frowned sternly at her son. “You’ll find running off much more difficult, then.”

Herbert, yet to be dismissed and suddenly frozen in uncertainty, as if a child again, said nothing, moved not an inch. He did not speak of the tales he’d heard from other patients of what it was like to live in one of the houses, all virtually identical to each other with identically anemic garden plots, that the mill had built for its workers. The restrictions placed on the occupants, he suspected Mrs. Farina would find much more onerous than her youngest child. When you had a house whose floors looked like this one’s, random, unannounced visits by an inspector tended to create a great deal of work and stress for the resident housewife. Meanwhile, the mill village had no shortage of children Alberto’s age, and one of them wandering off would probably be quite easily missed.

She wasn’t done. The look contorting on Mrs. Farina’s face was a stewing mish-mash of annoyance and concern, but her voice was just as stern as before as she told Alberto, “And you _know_ what your father says, you _know_. If you aren’t good, you’ll go to work at the mill with him and your brothers and sister. No more staying at home with me, no more helping with the laundry. You’ll be spinning in the mill with Bianca.”

Empty threat, at least for a couple of years, yet. The owner of the mill didn’t want children Alberto’s age working for him. Herbert had never met the man, but he’d heard what his opinion on the matter was. Very small children don’t take direction, he felt. Especially not the children of these shiftless foreigners, he felt. Best to wait longer, until time and church and maybe a little schooling can breed obedience into them. But for Alberto, it wouldn’t be much longer before he was old enough to be put to work in the poorly lit, hot, loud mill, wouldn’t be much longer before he could come home looking like his siblings, sweating and exhausted, covered in cotton fibers and machine oil and pounds of dust. Not much longer, not really. Just a few more years.

Mrs. Farina was stern, Alberto’s dark eyes were bright with fear and misery, and Herbert supposed he could safely assume that he had been dismissed, even if no one had said so. He shook off his inertia, and started to make for the door.

What flashed through his mind as he took the first step was the sight of Bianca, as she had appeared to him when she had shown up at his door earlier this morning. A girl of twelve—or thirteen; Herbert forgot which, and she was so short and skinny it was honestly hard to tell her age. She certainly cut a memorable figure: hair cut short as a boy’s to keep it from catching in whirring gears, constantly held herself like an arthritic old woman, had bags under her eyes that looked like bruises. What he always noticed about her, though, every time he saw her, was her left hand. Herbert didn’t see Bianca’s left hand very often; she kept it in her skirt pocket nearly constantly. But when she had to move objects or rub her hands together in the cold, he had seen it, and it was a sight he doubted would ever dissolve from his memory.

Bianca worked the spinning machines, alright. She worked the spinning machines, and in return, the spinning machines had eaten two of the fingers on her left hand, and given her ropes of scar tissue on what was left of that hand in return.

(Herbert had more than once been called to treat a sudden ailment of Bianca’s, only to find she was playing sick; her favorite tactic, clearly. To be fair, the working conditions were not exactly doing wonders for her health. There had been one checkup where Herbert had, for a few minutes, seriously considered the possibility that she had contracted tuberculosis from inhaling so much cotton—but no, that had just been a bad cold, whose symptoms were not faked, merely somewhat exaggerated. Herbert wondered if Alberto would have the wherewithal to copy his sister’s tactic.)

A sudden impulse, one Herbert didn’t quite understand, saw him giving Alberto’s shoulder a gentle squeeze as he stepped past him.

-0-0-0-

One could always tell when they were nearing Bolton. Rumors abounded of a planned rail line between Bolton and Arkham, but nothing had come of them yet that Herbert was aware of. None of the black, clinging smoke put off from trains could be seen in the skies around Bolton. Instead, what was immediately apparent to anyone approaching the town during working hours were the twin plumes of white smoke the mill just beyond it belched into the air. Even on a day like this, when the sky was a swirling stew of dingy, gray-white clouds beyond which the sun could just barely be seen, those plumes of thick, reeking smoke were immediately discernible.

Herbert hated the smell put off by the smoke. The bitter, clinging cold muted it, the wind carried it further, and the end result of that was that the two effects seemed to cancel each other out. The acrid reek lingered in Herbert’s nose, making the skin prickle and burn. He almost inevitably returned from excursions into Bolton with headaches that would pound on his skull for hours.

 _‘This is nothing_ ,’ Stephen had told him once, not long after they had moved here. He was trying to console him, that much was plain, and it had stayed Herbert’s tongue. _‘This is nothing,’_ and he had told tales of the perpetually-dingy skies of industrialized Chicago, how it had hardly been unusual, when he was a child, to step outside and find the sky painted an ugly, putrid brown, no trace of blue in sight. That, combined with the sheer amount of difficulty the Chicago of Stephen’s childhood had had maintaining the most basic level of cleanliness, made Herbert suspect he would have hated living there even more than he had hated Arkham, by the end.

Stephen had told him other stories, too; he’d felt he had to, after he’d seen the way the picture he’d painted of a filthy, smog-choked city had taken root in Herbert's mind. Somehow, the stories had eventually walked down roads leading to H.H. Holmes and the bones the police had unearthed from a labyrinthine boarding house (or was it a hotel? Stephen had never been terribly clear on that point) gutted by fire. Herbert had had many questions, Stephen was clearly experiencing certain regrets after enough of those questions were put to him, and they’d put the subject to bed.

Apart from the malodorous smoke belched out by the mill, Bolton was a relatively clean town. Herbert could at least take some comfort in that, as he took a step on to the furthest tributary of cobblestone sidewalk Bolton had to offer. Officially, the mill had no political power in Bolton, no power to affect the creation or enforcement of local ordinances. However, the mill also employed well over half of the people living in the Bolton area, and was far and away the largest source of potential wealth for the town.

The mill’s owner was anxious for Bolton to put on the best possible face, the better to lure new investors. One of the products of that desire was that cleanliness and sanitation laws were enforced much more vigorously than they would otherwise have been, and honestly? Herbert was perfectly happy with that state of affairs. Arkham had by no means been a place where trash and carrion and human filth were piled high on the streets, but on the hottest days of summer, the smell of all three could form a stomach-turning, fetid miasma. He had the feeling that the same wouldn’t be said of Bolton.

Most of the streets in Bolton proper were not paved, though they were well-graded enough that in times of torrential rain or melting snows, they merely became somewhat muddy, as opposed to a sucking quagmire (Which was more than could be said for the furthest reaches of Pond Street, where Herbert had learned early on that if you wanted to get somewhere without losing one of your shoes, it was better just to walk on the grass after rain). As Herbert walked down the sidewalk (huh, sidewalks, and no pavement on the street), he drank in the by-now familiar sight of muddy shoeprints on the cobblestones. It was time for the first lunch period at the mill, and a group of millworkers were standing and talking out front of the tavern. In Polish, today. Herbert had picked up a few words of Polish from treatment of broken noses and broken bones, when his patient brought a friend with a better grasp of English to act as an interpreter, but what he heard today was beyond him, which… Better just to move on.

The pharmacy was in a cramped space on the corner of Second Street and Broad Street; Herbert wasn’t certain why this particular corner store had so much less floor space than the other corner stores in town, and had never found the time to ask. The pharmacy was actually quite new; Mister Watson, the pharmacist, was the former assistant pharmacist at the pharmacy in Arkham, and had come here early last year. Herbert had been a little taken aback, to be honest, that Mister Watson would have chosen this particular space to try to establish himself. Both the address itself, and the town; the lack of a rail line or any reliable highways into town meant that either Mister Watson or Elsie had to run to Arkham whenever they needed to restock. But Herbert knew there was a certain allure to independence, even when in less than ideal circumstances.

The pharmacy’s windows, freshly polished, shone like silver, opaque and gleaming, as Herbert approached the storefront. No one was hanging around outside, which he was going to take as a good sign; maybe he could just pick up what he needed and head on towards home.

As Herbert was pressing the door open, he took absent notice of a new sign under the other, older ones. There was the mortar and pestle, there was ‘DRUGS,’ ‘COSMETICS,’ and ‘PERFUME.’ And under the four of them, in new, crisp black letters that held no tarnish of weather damage: ‘SODA.’

Hmm.

The floor of the pharmacy, what little of it was available to the customers before the barrier of the counter halted them, was clean. _Very_ clean, and Herbert suspected someone must have mopped quite recently, for the tiles to have that particular shine and for no mud to be clogged in the grout. There wasn’t even any dust under the chairs lined up against the far wall.

There wasn’t anyone in sight, and Herbert took the opportunity to look for—ah, there it was. Set up on the far side of the countertop, behind the metal mesh screen, there was a soda fountain. Brand new, or close to it; it certainly hadn’t been around the last time Herbert had come in here. He’d just file that one away for later.

Then, there came a “Just a moment!” from the back of the store, and Herbert bit back a sigh, shoulders tensing. That was _not_ Mister Watson’s voice, which meant…

“Good morning, Miss Watson.” It was important that he remembered his manners, at least.

Elsie emerged from the back of the store, tucking a few stray strands of her brown hair back behind her ear with one hand and wiping her other hand on her skirt. Her cheeks were red, though Herbert didn’t think it was from cold; the sweat raised on her brow tended to bely that assumption.

Her eyebrows shot up as she locked eyes with Herbert. “Oh, it’s you. What…” She tilted her head slightly, mouth quirking in a quizzical half-frown. “What do I call you, now?”

“We’re both adults,” Herbert replied, in tones even he would have to admit were rather clipped. “I don’t think given names would be entirely appropriate.”

Clipped tones or not, Elsie didn’t really seem to care. She just shrugged, and put her elbows on the counter. Looked down at him (Not far, they weren’t that far apart in height, but it was still down). “Fine, then, _Doctor_ West. What can I do for you?”

“Is your father in?”

“No. Dad had to run to Arkham; we’re short on some stuff, and my uncle’s sick again, so he wanted to see how he was.”

Herbert raised an eyebrow. “And he left you in charge?” He had, he would later have to admit, never paid much attention as to whether the pharmacy stayed open when it was Mister Watson making the supply run, as opposed to his daughter.

An expression halfway between a glare and a scowl darkened Elsie’s round face. “Hey, I’m licensed; don’t be a jerk. You’re not the only one who actually did something with your schooling.”

“In _Arkham_?”

“ _Yes_ , in Arkham.” After a moment, Elsie seemed to realize what she was saying, and waved a hand choppily in the air. “I’m not saying it was _easy_ , but yes, I was licensed in Arkham.” She bared her teeth in something approximating a smile. “I am a fully licensed pharmacist—“ she seemed to savor being able to say the words aloud, and really, that was no great shock “—and am perfectly capable of helping customers with their pharmaceutical needs. So, what do you want?”

“A bottle of Aspirin and a packet of lozenges.”

Any hint of combativeness melted away from Elsie as she turned on her heel towards the cabinets and their rows and rows of drawers. “Sure. It’ll be a few minutes; Dad insisted we rearrange everything, and I’m still trying to memorize where it all is, now.”

“Of course,” Herbert said evenly. Another delay, but unavoidable.

It must have been a slow day for the pharmacy, for as the first few minutes trickled by, no one came through the door. None of the passersby even stopped to look in through the windows. You’d think there would at least be someone wandering in looking for a headache cure, but no. The rolling sound of the heavy drawers shutting punctuated the silence, like the rolling of ocean waves at low tide.

Then, one of those drawers was slammed shut with a clang, and Herbert jumped, in spite of himself.

“You know, it’s strange.” There was nothing of the slammed drawer in Elsie’s tone. She stepped where Herbert couldn’t see her, and all he had to go on was that casual tone as she continued, “Of all the places I would have expected you to end up after medical school, I wouldn’t have thought it would be here.”

“Oh?” It did not do to alienate your pharmacist.

“I mean, I like Bolton. It’s new. There’s…” Elsie paused, and in her pause, the air grew somewhat taut and strained. “…I don’t know. Old places have this rot to them. No matter how they try to cover it up with perfume or try to cut the dead flesh away, the rot just spreads and spreads and spreads. But someone with your background, I would have thought you’d set your sights on Boston, not here.”

Herbert bit back a sigh, couldn’t keep from shaking his head. “You and my cousin could start a newspaper column on this topic.”

Another slammed drawer, and a slightly arch tone to not match with it at all: “Which one?”

“Isabelle.”

Herbert didn’t need to be looking at Elsie to know she was rolling her eyes; the timbre of her laugh told him all he needed to know of her expression. “Oh, Madam Isabelle. There’s a shock. Is there anything about a town like this to redeem it in the eyes of a woman like that?”

“Just judging by her letters? Absolutely nothing, no.” The letter he’d gotten last December had been… interesting. An invitation to join her and her husband and children for Christmas had been given in the same breath as… well… Safe to say that Isabelle did not think that Bolton had any attractions that would make it worth staying in around Christmastime. To say the least. At least Herbert’s own lingering illness had provided him with an unassailable excuse not to go.

“Again, I am so shocked.” Elsie returned to the counter with a glass bottle of Aspirin powder in hand, and no lozenges. “Sorry, but we’re out of lozenges. Everyone’s been after them lately. I had thought we had at least one packet left, but no luck.”

The memory of Stephen’s coughing reverberated in Herbert’s mind. He winced, but nodded. The fever reducer was ultimately more important. “Alright.” The harsh blare of a car horn interrupted him, before it let up long enough for him to ask, “How much do I owe you?”

“Five cents, and bring a note next time.” Elsie pursed her lips. “Dad says not to make too much of a fuss about it, since a lot of our customers don’t have a regular doctor, but we’re really not supposed to sell this stuff without a prescription.”

“I’ll remember.”

The car horn blared a second time while Elsie wrote up the receipt. Herbert gnawed on his lip, caught between a flinch and a slightly hysterical laugh. It was difficult not to know who was doing that. There was only one car in Bolton, driven by one of the shift supervisors at the mill, and he had attached a horn to his car specifically to blow it when he caught millworkers loitering in town, whether or not they ought to be working at the time. That was so many layers of brazen obnoxiousness that Herbert couldn’t begin to fathom what to do with it; it certainly betrayed a complete lack of breeding. Most of the times, he just wished he had the power to turn himself invisible.

Elsie handed him the receipt and the bottle with a flourish, smiling a little. “Anything else?”

Now or never, to ask the question. It would just look as if he hadn’t been paying any attention if he asked it later. “One thing. The soda fountain?”

Elsie’s smile froze on her face, bordering on rictus. “That? Dad wanted to ‘broaden our horizon’—his words, not mine. That tavern doesn’t serve soda, and it’s not like we have restaurants to compete with here, so it could be a big thing.”

“I see.” Herbert thought about pressing further, but then thought better of it. The Watsons weren’t the only ones in Bolton angling for an extra source of income. Instead, he said, “I’ll be seeing you, Miss Watson,” and let the stinging bite of the February air stand in for the retort he would have received if he had pressed.

-0-0-0-

Herbert found himself back home around half-past twelve, hunger putting an ache in his stomach stifled by the cold and the whirling track of his own mind. It didn’t look as if anyone had been around since he left—no new, muddy shoeprints left on the floor by people who didn’t know how to wipe their feet off on a mat, no new cotton fibers on the floor, no sign that any of the furniture in the waiting room (which doubled as a sitting room, thought it was rarely used for that purpose) had been disturbed. Well, at least that meant that there probably hadn’t been anyone coming around to pester Stephen while he was laid up.

Though, given that Herbert didn’t feel comfortable removing his coat in the house, there was at least one person he hoped had dropped by while he was gone.

“Is there any chance,” he asked, when he walked through the open doorway into Stephen’s room, “that the repairman came here while I was gone, apologized profusely for taking so long to fix our furnace, and said that he would get to it tomorrow? Or, dare I say it, _today_?”

“No chance,” Stephen told him, in a voice that sounded slightly rougher than it had when Herbert had left, though he was at least sitting up in bed as opposed to lying down.

Herbert made a sharp, discontented noise in his throat. “Of course. Well, I’ll try to keep the stove burning.”

The room was cold. Of course it was cold; at this time of year, it would have been cold even if the furnace _was_ working. The door was left open, the better to try to catch what warmth, however meager it might be by the time it reached the second floor, emanated from the kitchen stove. But it also meant that whatever warmth was put off by the meager sunlight heating up the window was diffused and rendered meaningless. It was just cold, a clammy, clinging cold that sank straight to the bone, and Herbert found himself irritated with it.

“I have your Aspirin.” Project calm. It was important to project calm. “They didn’t have any lozenges at the pharmacy; I’m sorry.”

“That’s fine. I don’t like lozenges, anyways.” Though the look Stephen shot at the bottle of Aspirin as Herbert set it down at his bedside table was not exactly one of fondness.

The water pitcher still had a decent amount of water in it; a little too much, perhaps, though Herbert couldn’t find it in himself to scold. “Have you eaten?” he asked, almost absently.

Stephen grimaced. “A little. Not much appetite.”

“Hmm.” Helplessness stung at his shoulders, prick, prick, prick, urging him towards movement. There was little he could do, and, well, that was the essence of helplessness, wasn’t it? “I’ll get you a measuring spoon and let you be,” he murmured. “I’m sure you want to rest.”

The silence stretched on so long and so deep that eventually, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling, Herbert looked over to meet Stephen’s gaze. Stephen was looking at him with an expression that Herbert was still learning how to decipher, something that sat caught in a net of fondness and longing and exasperation. “Yeah,” he said finally. There was something in his voice that sat beyond understanding. “I’d like to rest.”

Herbert wasn’t certain just what to make of that.

-0-0-0-

It was preferred that patients made some effort to schedule appointments before showing up at the house. Oh, Herbert knew that, in many cases, that was going to be a lost cause. Emergencies demanding immediate attention did not, by their very nature, bear waiting, and the lack of a telephone or telegraph made scheduling appointments ahead of time all the more difficult. But for the vast majority of patients, the explanation he had given as to _why_ he needed them to schedule appointments for anything that wasn’t in danger of becoming life-threatening—it’s nice to at least have the opportunity to have materials ready ahead of time—seemed to have just gone in one ear and out the other.

To be fair, Herbert thought that some of them genuinely had not understood what he was saying. He could find a small amount of consideration within him for them.

That consideration probably had something to do with why, when a pair of millworkers, red-faced and huffing and puffing, arrived at his door bearing Karel Jelínek between them, Karel Jelínek whom Herbert knew to have a hard time stringing a fully English sentence together even when he _wasn’t_ in agonizing pain, Herbert didn’t tell them to come back in a few hours.

Four men, three of them decidedly burly, were now crowded into Herbert’s consulting room, making the space decidedly cramped, seeming to compress the walls until they were pressing in. Herbert was tempted to send at least one of Jelínek’s friends out, but Meyer was serving as interpreter today (since Jelínek had a better grasp of German than English, and Herbert’s grasp of German was shaky, and his Czech nonexistent). Meyer was the interpreter, and the last time Herbert had let O’Brien wander around the house unsupervised, he’d gone into the kitchen and, for some reason, picked up and then (presumably accidentally) dropped a plate. He also didn’t want them wandering upstairs and bothering Stephen. In here, they would stay.

Shirt removed and shivering in the cold, Jelínek’s chest was purpled with bruises that, in conjunction with the abrasions on his hands, were painting a picture that had slowly been growing clearer and more vibrant to Herbert over the past couple of months. O’Brien had shown up here in much the same state around a month ago, plus a dislocated shoulder and minus the whimpers Herbert elicited by prodding Jelínek’s abdomen. Fell off of a ladder, O’Brien had claimed, and had skirted around the question of why his knuckles were so bruised as to be virtually black with a shrug and a cagey “Dunno.”

Fine. Don’t press, pretend to not know _exactly_ what was going on here, and perhaps they would tell him on their own, eventually. Herbert was hardly going to turn down the extra work and the extra revenue, not when his thoughts strayed to house payments and the cost of materials for experimentation at odd moments.

“I think we can safely assume you have a broken rib,” Herbert told Jelínek matter-of-factly, reaching behind him for a roll of bandages.

Meyer relayed this information to Jelínek, who reacted to this news with somewhat less enthusiasm than you would expect if he had been told that he was being transferred from the textile mill to a coal mine, but he nodded. And he engaged in a minimal amount of squirming as Herbert wrapped his chest with bandages; Herbert would give him that.

A round of hoarse, hacking coughs sounded from upstairs as Herbert wrote up his recommendations on a slip of paper. His eyes flickered towards the ceiling, hand clenching around his pencil. Stephen’s fever had slowly, ever so slowly, been going down over the past couple of days; Herbert wasn’t certain if he could attribute that to the cold’s hold over him loosening, or if it was just the Aspirin doing its work as it ought. The coughing, meanwhile, had not abated at all.

He had poked a hole through the paper with the tip of his pencil, and O’Brien was looking at him with some concern. Herbert forced his hand light and untroubled, and kept on writing.

“Take this to the pharmacy.” The paper was handed to Jelínek, the words directed to Meyer beside him for translation. “There’s not much for it but to keep your chest wrapped until the rib heals, and take a painkiller in the meantime. Change the bandages once a day—if they get dirty before then, change them then. Come back to me in a week, so I can look you over again.”

Meyer nodded. “Thank you, Doctor,” and he steered Jelínek out by the shoulder.

O’Brien, meanwhile, began rooting around through his pockets; it seemed he would be paying for Jelínek today. Finally, he took a couple of bills, both of them streaked with old grease, and handed them over to Herbert. “We’d appreciate it if you kept quiet about this,” he said meaningfully. “Jelínek just took a bit of a spill, and he’s embarrassed,” was tacked on a moment later, but did nothing to take the meaningfulness from his earlier words.

He could check the denomination of the bills later; now would just be gauche. Herbert merely nodded crisply. “I don’t see why I would just go around telling everyone that a man has a broken rib. There’s nothing outstandingly unusual about that, is there?”

“No,” and this time, O’Brien’s tone was unmistakably appreciative. “No, sir; thank you.”

“How is your shoulder?” Herbert’s eyes narrowed as he focused on O’Brien’s shoulders, trying to discern some fault or infirmity. “You never did come back to let me give it a second look.”

O’Brien’s face went carefully blank; maybe Herbert had miscalculated. “Fine. Better.” Then, there came a spark of something in his gray eyes, and he took an envelope (not grease-stained) from his jacket. “Oh, by the way. We ran into the postman on our way here; I have your mail.”

“Thank you, Mister O’Brien,” and Herbert didn’t bother looking at the envelope as he sat down to write up his notes. He listened to trudging footsteps made heavy with long days and back-breaking work, until finally the front door slammed shut and there was silence.

How many men had shown up here with injuries like that, now? Counting Jelínek today and O’Brien last month, Herbert thought he had seen to five. He wasn’t certain how many Stephen had seen to; when he was better, they ought to compare notes. Herbert suspected the results would prove very interesting, indeed.

_Now, where might they be doing it?_

Herbert tapped the pencil against his lips, feeling almost cheerful as he thought of remote barns and abandoned buildings. A small mystery, a mystery whose answer had no power to hurt him, there was a novelty.

His cheer evaporated when he finally looked to the envelope O’Brien had passed him before leaving.

The handwriting, tight-packed and uneven and very familiar, was enough to send a sudden flash of sick, nauseous heat radiating up his spine. The name written in the return address—‘Jasper Chastain’—only solidified the feeling, leaving Herbert longing for the cold as relief from the frenzied churning of his stomach.

 _What does he even_ want? Herbert wondered, picking at one of the edges of the envelope with a hand that was starting to shake, just a little. His uncle hadn’t contacted him since he had entered the university; none of his uncles had. He hadn’t even moved out of the valley to go to medical school, and yet he’d gotten what he had been craving desperately by the time he was old enough to break away from his surviving kin. Out of sight, out of mind—living in Arkham proper, and to them, it was as if he had died with his parents, or his paternal grandparents. Isabelle was the only one who had acknowledged his existence at all since leaving, and even then, it was only recently that her letters had become anything but perfunctory notes.

Herbert stared at the envelope, and his stomach began to churn so hard it ached.

The heavy (weighted?) desk drawer was yanked open with a squeal of slightly rusted wheels along the track. Herbert took a certain vicious pleasure in burying the letter under notebooks and textbooks alike. Part of him just wanted to burn it. If by some remote chance his uncle actually came down here asking about it, Herbert could just tell his uncle that he had never received the letter—oh, you know how things just get lost in the mail, especially out here—and trust that the man’s nature precluded any chance of him following up with the post office. But on the off-chance that it was genuinely something important, he could just say that he had been busy the day he received it, and had forgotten all about it.

Huh, forgotten about it. The idea of claiming that was almost soothing.

The letter was still lurking at the back of Herbert’s mind come suppertime, though with another task at hand it was little more than an uncomfortable prickle, like the shadow of a papercut.

There was a central kitchen in Bolton that made a killing cooking meals for millworkers—single men, single women, families where both parents worked, you name it. But Herbert didn’t think it was _just_ millworkers they did delivery for, and really, he should have thought to employ their services. Preparing meals was somewhat more difficult to accomplish when he was balancing both his and Stephen’s patients by himself, and it took longer when it was just him.

Not that tonight’s supper was going to be an especially complex affair. Stephen’s sore throat had been making swallowing dry food rather painful for him, and Herbert’s own appetite was rather lacking, so it was down to one of the cans of soup Herbert had bought from what passed for a grocery store and was certain would have cost less if it was easier to get to Arkham or any other town with a real grocery store in it. He’d never had mock turtle soup before. He hoped it was at least edible.

He was poring over the stove. The sick heat that had assailed him earlier had dissipated gradually, so that by the time it had gotten dark he was grateful to be standing before the stove again, soaking in the heat that touched his front, while the back of him was as cold as it would have been if the stove wasn’t burning at all. The smell of the slowly cooking soup in the pan wasn’t unpleasant, but it didn’t stoke his appetite at all.

So long as it didn’t make him sick, he didn’t care about appetite or taste overmuch. Not making him sick was about the best he could expect, really.

All of a sudden, there was a hand pressed between his shoulders, then stroking a light track down his back. Herbert jumped nearly out of his skin, heart juddering in his chest as his eyes snapped to Stephen standing beside him, looking surprised by his reaction, but somewhat less than repentant. Herbert swallowed back on the rebuke that had formed in his throat, uncertain of what had germinated there or what had even sparked it in the first place. “Go sit down,” he said instead, willing his voice to be steady and not quite succeeding. “It’s almost ready.”

Stephen started to say something about Herbert startling easily, but his voice was so hoarse that the words were visibly painful for him, and he stopped halfway through and shook his head ruefully. He tugged at the collar of his dressing gown as he sat down, trying to pull it closer about him.

“I didn’t realize we were out of tea bags until this afternoon,” Herbert said a few minutes later, listlessly stirring his soup with his spoon. They were both in the habit of drinking tea on winter evenings even when neither one of them were sick; another way to chase after warmth. With no tea bags, that left them with water, no milk since Pond Street was so badly mired that the milkman couldn’t get to them, and alcohol that Herbert disliked and that Stephen really shouldn’t be drinking while he was ill. “I’m sorry; I’ll try to track some down tomorrow.”

“It’s okay.” Having taken a few gulps of water, a few mouthfuls of soup, Stephen’s voice was a little stronger, and listening to it wasn’t nearly as painful as before.

The meat in the soup was tough and difficult to chew on. Herbert took a few unenthusiastic mouthfuls, wondering discontentedly if it was _supposed_ to be this tough, before focusing his attention on the broth instead.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, peering intently at Stephen’s face. He didn’t like that flush, but then again, he’d been disliking that flush for days now, and it didn’t look like it had gotten any _worse_. “Is there any change…”

Stephen shook his head, a few strands of disheveled dark hair falling onto his forehead; Herbert’s fingers itched as he looked at them. “No change, not really.” A gulp of water later, and he elaborated, voice a little smoother, “My throat feels like someone’s been rubbing sandpaper on it, I’m always cold—“

“That’s not just you.”

“You’re still bad to interrupt me,” but there was no venom in his voice, only gentle reproach, “and I feel a bit…” He shrugged. “…Weak. A bit like a photograph left out too long in the sun.”

“Hmm.” Herbert searched his soup bowl for his reflection, but found only murky broth and chunks of dark meat. “Do you _often_ get this sick in winter? I don’t remember you _ever_ becoming seriously ill when we were still in school.” Except during what was now remembered in Arkham as the plague times, but that had been a special case, and Stephen had always been the picture of health, otherwise.

At that, Stephen snorted. “You haven’t seen me when I go home for Christmas.”

“Oh, there.” Herbert rolled his eyes. “And you don’t suppose that the air being choked with noxious smoke might have something to do with it?”

“Don’t knock my hometown; I’ve seen yours.” Just going by the expectant gleam in Stephen’s eyes, he seemed to be waiting for a reply, but Herbert had always had a difficult time figuring out what to do with rebukes when they were delivered gently, so after a few moments, “I get sick all the time around Christmas. You just haven’t seen it.”

“And last December was… what, exactly?”

“Last December—“ Stephen jabbed his spoon in Herbert’s direction “—I was here, nursing _you_. Remember? Huh, maybe the air here is a little better for me. Rather more wholesome.”

Herbert almost laughed. He’d never heard anyone describe the air of the Miskatonic valley as _wholesome_ before.

Stephen, meanwhile, was giving his soup bowl a bemused look. “What sort of soup is this? You didn’t say?”

“Mock turtle soup.”

For some reason that Herbert couldn’t fathom, but saw his shoulders tensing, Stephen responded to this with a laugh. “Oh, really?”

“Yes, really.” Herbert drew his shoulders up and narrower a little more. “Is that such a surprise?”

Stephen gave the back of Herbert’s hand a single short pat. Contact lasted just a moment, and yet Herbert could feel the feverish heat burning under his skin as clearly as if it was Herbert’s skin that was burning. “No, no. I just never figured you to go for calf’s head.”

“Hmm.” His grandmother had hated organ meat, and thus Herbert had never eaten it for as long as she was alive. It was… It was edible. “I don’t dislike it.”

What had previously been lurking in the back of Herbert’s mind resurfaced as he ate his cooling soup. The letter was sitting still in his desk drawer, buried beneath several pounds of paper and binding, and yet he could feel it, feel the edges digging into his skin. Whatever it was, he couldn’t imagine it would actually be worth his time. The last he checked, Herbert and the bulk of the family were done with each other. Only one or two exceptions to that, and he knew they didn’t represent the opinion of the whole. They were done with each other, and nothing was really going to change that.

It could cause some amount of trouble if Uncle Jasper actually came down here looking for him over it. The man was… Well, he wasn’t as formidable as some of his other relatives, and could probably be sent away with less trouble coming from it than Herbert’s other uncles. Still, Herbert didn’t need the attention a fight with his uncle might wind up drawing to himself. For what he was doing, he did not need that sort of spotlight thrust upon him, not at all.

He considered telling Stephen about it. If trouble came knocking, it would be better if the first Stephen knew about it _wasn’t_ when it had arrived on their doorstep. Herbert wanted…

He couldn’t. He just couldn’t. Besides, he didn’t really think his uncle would consider him worth the effort of tracking down.

The hairs that had fallen over Stephen’s forehead had not righted themselves—hardly a surprise, but Herbert couldn’t stand it any longer. He leaned across the table, one hand braced on the edge and the other brushing the stray hair from Stephen’s brow. The more prolonged touch only confirmed what Herbert had felt earlier: fever still burning under his skin like fire unchecked, dry and parched. “There.” It was almost a painful effort for Herbert to draw his hand back from Stephen’s hair. “Better,” Herbert muttered.

The only light in the room came from the gas lamp sitting on the kitchen counter, off to the side of the two of them, and the dying red light of sunset seen through the windows. Dim light, unreliable light, light Herbert wouldn’t have read or written by, and yet, when Herbert looked back up, he could see, with perfect clarity, the way Stephen was looking at him.

When Stephen reached forward, laid his hand on top of Herbert’s, Herbert found himself smiling back.

-0-0-0-

Herbert had been waiting for news of some sort of accident on the roads in or around Bolton all winter. Arkham had always had a spate of road accidents in the winter owing to poor conditions on the roads, and the number had only increased after the first few trucks and motorcars were introduced to the place. It was inevitable; when the snows fell and the paved roads froze over, there went any traction you might otherwise have possessed. When the snows fell and then melted a little, the paved roads had the same problem as before since the snow would melt overnight, and meanwhile, the unpaved roads became the sort of quagmire that could mire a carriage up past the wheels and into the coach.

There had been an incident just outside of Arkham when Herbert was six years old. A sinkhole had opened up suddenly and swallowed a stagecoach whole, driver, passengers, horses and all, and seen them plummeting down into an abyss of mud and darkness and icy water. The story had been carried in the local newspaper for days. A sinkhole in Massachusetts was rather uncommon, after all, even in a place so full of the esoteric as the Miskatonic valley, and none of the bodies, human or equine, had ever been recovered.

Road accidents were the order of the day in winter time, and thus, Herbert had been expecting them. Bolton, so far, had not obliged; there wasn’t a single report of a wagon overturning or a horse slipping and breaking a leg on stone glazed over with ice. Despite the infrastructure being much poorer than Arkham, Bolton had managed to be much better about avoiding road accidents than Arkham. Then again, maybe this was an off year, or maybe it was just that there were so many gruesome accidents at the mill that there was none left over for the road. (That probably wasn’t it.)

By late February, certainly, when snow or sleet fell from the sky every time the skies grew thick with clouds, melted, then refroze overnight, Bolton was overdue for some sort of road accident. Herbert just didn’t expect that, considering how far removed his home was from Bolton proper, _he_ would ever be called to help deal with the initial fallout of the incident.

“Is the situation terribly dire?”

The patrolman, Ainsley (his given name escaped Herbert at present; actually, he couldn’t remember if he had ever heard Ainsley’s given name), simply shrugged. “I wasn’t there; I wouldn’t know. I was just told to find anyone I could to help.”

“Not so dire as to require the use of a wagon?” Herbert pressed, for though they were moving at a decent clip, it was difficult to escape the fact that they were moving on _foot_ , as opposed to sitting in a wagon or any other kind of vehicle. The mud caking Herbert’s shoes didn’t allow him the fantasy of sitting in a wagon.

Again, Ainsley shrugged, but just as the mud was impossible to miss, so too was the way Ainsley’s back stiffened, ever so slightly. “It’s not for me to say, sir. I was just told to bring anyone I could find.”

“I see.”

It would have been nice to have had more information. No information, and Herbert could walk onto the scene and be confronted with anything from a concussion to severed limbs. Either end of the spectrum begged quicker travel than could be achieved on foot through the mud, and the closer Herbert drew to the town, the more his hands began to itch and ache with unspent energy, the more his mind began to race, the more his throat thrummed nervously.

Of course, present company hardly improved his mood. Herbert was never especially happy to see one of Bolton’s police force show up at his door. Of course, if they were injured (never ill; the other physicians in town didn’t look down their noses at policemen as they did at millworkers), they would be treated. It was usually Stephen who deal with any injured policeman who showed up at their door, and it was Herbert who handled things when policemen showed up at their door asking questions about their patients.

There were only ever questions about the activities of their patients; small mercies. Bolton’s police force was rather more diligent than Herbert would have expected, given the size of the town, the size of the police force, and the sheer amount of trouble caused by the rowdiest of the millworkers. Herbert hadn’t been expecting it; it had always been so easy to dodge the Arkham police that he had thought that Bolton, where nearly the entirety of the police force were volunteers, would have presented him with even less trouble.

Sad to say that diligence was a problem—Stephen had a hundred tales of horror regarding the Chicago police; the dubious advantage of having a recently retired police captain for a father—but in this case, it very much was a problem. Herbert was so, _so_ tired of throwing his weight against a wall of aggressively superstitious ignorance, but all the same, he knew precisely how it would look if the police discovered what he and Stephen were doing in their basement before they could achieve reliable results.

Dean Halsey had told stories of how the university had acquired cadavers when he was a student—Halsey had studied medicine in Pennsylvania, where dissection of human cadavers had very much _not_ been legal at the time, and cadavers were obtained and dissections were conducted with the greatest discretion, the better to avoid angry mobs of the dead’s living loved ones. Other stories Herbert had heard also came to mind. Not just of resurrection men, not just of the rumors floating around concerning the origins of the cadavers he had dissected in school, but stories he was afraid would color the way an uneducated policeman regarded an experiment in progress. Herbert had no desire for him and Stephen to be slandered as the American Burke and Hare.

Herbert fidgeted with his scarf and reflected moodily that at least they were making this walk while the sun was still high in the sky. He was occasionally prevailed upon to leave the house on business after nightfall, and he felt often as if there was a… The only way he could describe it was to say that he felt as if there was a presence. When he looked over his shoulder, he never saw anyone, but often, he could swear he heard another set of footfalls sounding behind him. He rarely felt alone.

It was around fifteen minutes following that reflection that Herbert finally got a good look at the site of the accident.

Whoever it was who had told Ainsley to find anyone he could to come help clearly had little understanding of what constituted an emergency, especially one for which someone living a fair distance out from town needed to be called, when there were already trained physicians living in the town itself.

At least Herbert wouldn’t have to listen to that damned horn anymore.

Having rapidly ascertained that the situation had long since been brought under control and that his own presence was entirely superfluous, Herbert excused himself. He met no one on the road home, not even Alberto Farina sneaking out from under his mother’s supervision, and for that, he was grateful. Now, irritation raced under his skin to replace that unspent energy, and he was not certain he could have kept his tone soft and his gaze inoffensive, had he met anyone on the road.

A round of coughing greeted Herbert as he retrieved a clean pair of shoes from a hidden corner of the coatroom. Herbert looked to the staircase, ran his teeth over his lips. He’d clean the mud off of his discarded shoes later.

“How do you feel?” The words were out of his mouth before he had crossed through the doorway. Herbert actually paused there a moment, looking Stephen over with brow furrowed. He had been looking a little better these past couple of days, and he didn’t look any worse than he had when Herbert had left to go see about the non-emergency, but his waxen skin and red-rimmed eyes still ignited something jagged and sickly hot in the pit of Herbert’s stomach. A lingering ailment was a blight on a house.

Stephen shrugged. “No worse.” His hoarse voice was, while stronger than it had been during the worst of his illness, almost completely unrecognizable. His dark eyes flickered over Herbert, that gaze that had always made Herbert feel somewhat less… It was a singular sort of nakedness, the feeling inspired by that gaze. Herbert didn’t know what to do with it.

“Let me take your temperature.” This was a refuge, though.

“I’ve already taken my temperature.” Herbert made for the dresser close to the bed, reaching for the thermometer, and Stephen shook his head vigorously, though the sound that first escaped his mouth was something close to a laugh. “Really, Herbert. Just ten minutes ago.”

Herbert nodded briskly. “And now I’m taking your temperature. I’d like some confirmation of my own.” They locked eyes. Herbert rolled the thermometer in his hands. “Please.”

Stephen rolled his eyes and took the proffered thermometer. “Fine. You can see what I saw ten minutes ago.”

The mercury always rose so slowly, though Herbert suspected his own impatience might be coloring his perceptions. Rise it did, though, and it eventually ceased just below the tick mark for one hundred degrees. Herbert almost smiled; that was a little better than yesterday. Short, jittery breath.

“There, you see?” Stephen clapped his hand against his thigh, a sound muffled by multiple layers of clothing, sheets, and a pair of quilts. “Now—“ what fired his eyes now was curiosity “—what was that all about earlier? What was Tom Ainsley—“ ah, that was his name “—doing here?”

A thin, hot giggle tore from Herbert’s mouth, a sound a little like choking. “It’s completely ridiculous that I was called upon at all,” he muttered. Hands braced on the edge of the dresser, shoulders taut, he felt a little like wood. “Completely ridiculous.”

“You’d better tell me, then.” This time, when Stephen’s hand lit on Herbert’s back, Herbert didn’t jump, and Stephen didn’t take his hand away. “You’re worse than a wet cat when you get annoyed.”

Herbert gave a barking laugh. “Bolton is a one-car town no more. It is now a _no_ -car town, and that car is destined for nowhere but the scrapyard.”

“Good.” No fountain of sympathy for the driver to be found anywhere in _this_ house. “The man drove like a maniac. But that’s not all that happened, is it? They didn’t really call you out there just because the car met its fate, did they?”

“No.” Herbert raked his fingernails. “No, that’s not all that happened. The car managed to collide with a wagon when the wheels spun on the ice, and that wagon collided with another wagon. There’s a gigantic mess outside of the post office; they’ll be picking splinters off of the ground for weeks.”

Stephen’s voice softened as he asked, “Was anyone hurt?”

“Not… not badly, no.” Which was a good thing. Anyone who died from injuries sustained in an incident like this one would likely have been too mangled for Herbert to really do anything for them, even if he had a serum that could reliably restore both the body and the mind. And meanwhile, the ravenous machines of the textile mill waited for any opportunity they could seize to devour; Herbert needed another opportunity to refine the serum, and soon. “The car hit one of the horses, but I don’t know anything about what happened to it; it had already been removed from the scene by the time I arrived.”

Herbert did not want to think about the sort of look Stephen must have been directing his way. He stroked up and down Herbert’s back with his hand, provoking a shuddering sigh. “You’re getting awfully worked up about this.”

“It was just a massive waste of time,” came the muttered reply. “I just—“ Herbert drummed his fingers against the dresser. “I’m sorry,” he said abruptly. “You must be tired. I’ll leave you be.”

Stephen’s hand fell away from his back. When Herbert caught sight of Stephen’s face as he turned, he was confronted with another look he was still learning how to interpret: fondness and exasperation that this time mingled with something unfulfilled, something Herbert thought Stephen might have been trying to conceal. They looked at each other in silence, until finally Herbert found his voice to ask, “What is it?”

Stephen shook his head, a smile coming over his mouth that would have looked genuine if Herbert hadn’t been around him for as long as he had. “Nothing.”

It clearly wasn’t _nothing_ , and Herbert felt a little as if the floor had shifted beneath him, to lie on a slope. Seeing nothing else to do, he started for the door. Walked towards the door, and stopped in the doorway, hand pressed flat against the doorframe.

He was remembering, suddenly, how Stephen had acted while Herbert was ill last December. Even under normal circumstances, Stephen was a much more tactile person than was Herbert; he was much more comfortable with touching than was Herbert, and Herbert often noticed the difference (Noticed the difference between touching and being touched). When Herbert fell ill for the first time since catching typhoid off of one of the afflicted last summer, Stephen had become even more tactile than usual. Herbert’s skin was sore and over-sensitive, so that even draping the bedclothes over his body was so uncomfortable as to be nearly unbearable, and he had endured those touches, which would normally have been pleasant, as best he could, biting back his protests.

There had eventually been something that was truly unbearable. It was cold; this had been around the time the furnace had broken down for the second time, and even though the repairman had come promptly that time, the drafty house was still miserably cold. If he had been feeling well, he likely would have welcomed it when Stephen lied down on his bed next to him and pulled him over into his arms, for warmth as well as for companionship. As it was, the pressure of contact made his skin _scream_ , and he had shoved weakly at Stephen’s chest until he finally let go. Herbert knew Stephen hadn’t understood his reaction; the look on his face, a few degrees shy of a kicked dog, communicated as much. They hadn’t really talked about it.

Now, he was thinking that incident might have been a clue.

Herbert’s arm was stiff as he draped his jacket over one of the posts at the foot of the bed. Stephen’s bed still felt like foreign territory to him, like taking a step into a murky pond when you have no idea where the bottom is, despite the fact that he had slept in it at least a couple of nights a week for the past several months, that number rising to four or five during the coldest period of winter. It was a place where he was still struggling to feel like he belonged, despite its owner never being anything but welcoming of his presence. He would… The mattress squealed in protest as Herbert sat down on the edge of the bed, prompting a wince. He would very much like for that feeling to dissipate, finally.

He didn’t have much of an opportunity to reflect on it further. Barely a moment after Herbert settled his weight on the bed, Stephen wrapped both arms around his waist, yanking him downwards.

Herbert hoped, really hoped, that Stephen didn’t hear the reflexive squeak that escaped his mouth. He’d be hearing about it later if he had. “At least let me get my shoes off first!” he spluttered, trying to sit up—not so easily accomplished, right now.

Stephen let out an undeniably frustrated huff, but slipped his arms off of Herbert’s waist. “Get on with it, then.”

Shoes off, and his tie undone and collar loosened for good measure; pressure on his neck when he was lying down had never been anything approaching pleasant. Slipping under the bedclothes was taken as an invitation, which—fine; it was _meant_ as an invitation. Herbert clicked his tongue as Stephen buried his face in the crook of his neck, fighting the urge to smile. “You are a ridiculous man,” he murmured into Stephen’s tousled hair. “If this was what you wanted, you might have said so.”

Stephen nuzzled his neck; the sensation of his stubbled jaw rubbing against Herbert’s smooth skin sent a shiver down his spine. “You didn’t give me much of a chance to,” he retorted, the words half-lost in Herbert’s skin. “Whenever you come in here, it’s just in and out; you never stand still long enough for me to ask.”

“If you can’t seize the moment, you’ll find you can’t blame me for it.” But Herbert was smiling, now. He set one hand on Stephen’s shoulder, the other on his back. “You’ve only yourself to blame for that.”

A soft laugh that rumbled under Herbert’s rib cage. “Chasing after you isn’t a job for a sick man. I hope you didn’t have anything planned for this afternoon.”

“Hmm, no.”

Outside, the sun was shining, and sunlight fell in four golden panels across the bed, gilding the outermost layer of bedclothes and lending the cloth where it touched a certain, feeble warmth. Herbert could hear birds singing.

Stephen’s body pressed against his was warmer than the sunlight spilling on the bed, and the rise and fall of his chest and the hand lazily stroking his back lulled Herbert to pleasant drowsiness. He hadn’t intended to stay for long—he might not have any appointments scheduled for the afternoon, but he did have some work to do. But within a few minutes, he’d fallen asleep, not to wake until the sun was setting and the light glimmering on the bedclothes was cold and red.

**Author's Note:**

> I put ‘Six Shots by Midnight’ as occurring in 1907 as opposed to 1906, but it was fun to set up the elements at work in that episode. Incorporating what I know of life in the early twentieth century, and what would still have been within living memory—or recently living memory—was fun, too, though I feel like someone’s going to come along at any moment and poke a thousand holes in my knowledge. Also, I never was able to figure out what a bottle of aspirin would have cost in 1906. I found a figure for a tin of Aspirin in 1930--$0.15--and decided to go lower for 1906; I know inflation is far from the only factor that would affect pharmaceutical retail prices, and if anyone knows what the actual price, I'd like to hear it.


End file.
